NAGPUR: Even though the Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC) had announced that Covishield won't be available for the 18-44 age group on Thursday but only for those aged 45 years and above, many beneficiaries from the younger population turned up at different government centres.
Also, some confusion prevailed among citizens regarding Covishield and Covaxin, which have different schedules for different age groups. The NMC has reserved 50% offline slots for spot registration of the 45+ age group, as these beneficiaries are more comfortable with the manual process, civic officials said.
A resident of Laxmi Nagar said he and his wife fall in the 18-44 group and were surprised to know that they were not eligible for Covishield dose on Thursday. “We know some people who tested positive soon after vaccination. Hence, we are trying to avoid crowds. But when we reached, there were no doses,” they said.
Free-of-cost Covishield doses won’t be available for any age group at any government centre in the city for the next two days. Civic officials were also unaware if the drive would resume on Saturday in the city. However, the NMC would continue with Covaxin doses at the three designated centres — Ambedkar Hospital, GMCH and Mahal Diagnostics Centre — for all groups.
Paucity of doses once again slowed down the vaccination programme, which, a day before had surpassed 63,000 inoculations in the district. Out of 204 vaccination centres, many centres couldn’t stretch their session beyond 1pm, while several others managed not more than 50 vaccinations in the day.
The figures plummeted to 22,243 on Thursday. Of these, 16,990 were done in the city and 5,253 were from the rural centres.
Additional municipal commissioner Ram Joshi said the civic body hadn’t received the vaccination schedule as on Thursday evening. “Covaxin would be available to run three centres for all age groups and both doses. Some centres had to shut down by 1pm as they ran out of doses. Some 18-45 years age-group beneficiaries had gathered at some centres to enquire, though we had announced unavailability of vaccines for them. We are sending alerts a day in advance on social media and in newspapers to ensure people don’t face trouble,” he said.
With increased vaccination centres, the civic body now needs at least 50,000 doses everyday for the city, which gets 50% of the district’s allotted doses. But the district is expecting not more than 50,000 doses in the next delivery from the state government, probably by Saturday.
